Poto and Cabengo (names given, respectively, by Grace and Virginia Kennedy to themselves) are American identical twins who used an invented language (Cryptophasia) until the age of about eight.
The girls were apparently of normal intelligence. They developed their own communication as they had little exposure to spoken language in their early years. Poto and Cabengo were the names they called each other.
Poto and Cabengo is also the name of a documentary film about the girls made by Jean-Pierre Gorin and released in 1980.
Birth
Grace and Virginia Kennedy were born in 1970 in Columbus, Georgia. Their father maintained that a surgeon told him the girls might experience developmental disabilities. Apparently misunderstanding speculation for diagnosis, the girls' parents ceased to pay more attention to them than necessary.
Early circumstances
Both parents were employed (although later characterized by The San Diego Tribune as living on "food stamps and welfare") and spent many hours away from home. The girls were left in the care of a grandmother who met their physical needs but did not play or interact with them. The grandmother spoke only German, while the parents spoke English.
Their father later stated in interviews that he realized the girls had invented a language of their own, but, since their use of English remained extremely rudimentary, he had decided that they were, as the doctor suggested, developmentally challenged and that it would do no good to send them to school.
When he lost his job, he told a caseworker at the unemployment office about his family; the caseworker advised him to put the girls in speech therapy. At the Children's Hospital of San Diego, in California, speech therapists Ann Koeneke and Alexa Kratze () discovered that Virginia and Grace had invented a complex idioglossia.
Language
The twins' language was characterized by an extremely fast tempo and a staccato rhythm, traits the girls transferred to their spoken English following speech therapy. Linguistic analysis revealed that their language was a mixture of English and German (their mother and grandmother were German born) with some neologisms and several idiosyncratic grammatical features. Despite being mainstreamed and placed in separate classes, the girls remained affected by their family's emotional neglect. A follow-up as they approached the age of 30 revealed that Virginia worked on an assembly line in a supervised job training center, while Grace mopped floors at the fast-food restaurant McDonald's.
Sample speech extract
:"Pinit, putahtraletungay." (Finish, potato salad hungry.)
::"Nis, Poto?" (This, Poto?)
:"Liba Cabingoat, it." (Dear Cabengo, eat.)
::"Ia moa, Poto?" (Here more, Poto?)
:"Ya." (Yeah.)